Alejandro Hortal, Ph. D.

A reply to a reply.

Ralph Hertwig @susanmichie.bsky.social @robertjwest.bsky.social & Stephen Reicher respond to a commentary from Luc Bovens on their BPP paper.

doi.org/10.1017/bpp....

The Economist Association of Madrid just published (in Spanish, a much more philosophical language than English, or German 😉) the best introduction to Behavioral Economics. I wrote the chapter on Ethics and Behavioral Public Policy. I was in Madrid with the other authors last Monday to present it.

15th Braga Meetings (Portugal, June 25-27). Working on Philosophy, technology (AI, algorithms) in behavioral economics applied to public policy? Stefano Calboli (University of Minho) and I are organizing one of the big panels. Send an abstract!!! 15bragameetings.weebly.com/p10---philos...

If interested, exciting workshop in Mexico City on Behavioral Public Policy, Behavioral Economics. @bppjournal.bsky.social

CIDE International Behavioural Public Policy Workshop (IBPPW) | IBPPA 13 Mar 2025, 08:00 – 14 Mar 2025, 20:00

If interested, Intl. Behavioral Public Policy Assoc. is organizing a small workshop in Mexico City (CIDE campus), March 13-14 (no fees). If interested, please email abstract before Jan. 15th, to a_hortal@uncg.edu. Prof. Adam Oliver (LSE) will deliver keynote lecture. www.ibppa.org/event-detail...

Making an option salient (a nudge) can improve patience in people (a virtue). Could this be a virtue-nudge? Through repetition, can they affect character (intention and deliberation) so people become more virtuous? I think so, as I argued here... behanomics.com/bej/article/...

Any spot left?

Sunstein: "Knightian uncertainty is real, and it poses challenging and unresolved issues for decision theory and regulatory practice." @bppjournal.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

For all the PPE folks out there: We're co-organizing a PPE+L conference in Bangalore, India, Dec 11-14, 2025. CFA deadline: Jan 15, 2025. Please share widely and spread the word! ppel.tenureslack.com/call-for-abs...

Decisions under Risk Are Decisions under Complexity (December 2024) - We provide evidence that classic lottery anomalies like probability weighting and loss aversion are not special phenomena of risk. They also arise (and often with equal strength) whe...

ICYMI - A link to the Ryan Oprea paper challenging Prospect Theory’s heuristics & biases

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Adam Oliver's article @bppjournal.bsky.social supports a policymaker's role in enhancing agency by investing in human capital. It also legitimizes government regulations to protect individuals from manipulative practices that exploit behavioral inconsistencies. www.cambridge.org/core/product...

The Perfect Storm: Mitigating A Convergence Of Forces To Optimize Vaccination | Health Affairs Forefront The convergence of uninsured adults without access to vaccination services, mis/disinformation, and partisan politics translates to tangible outcomes including a dip in kindergarten vaccination rates; persistently low adult vaccination rates; and an erosion of trust in government, public health, and the system responsible for the development, licensure, and administration of vaccines.

Stunning numbers that I hadn't fully appreciated before reading this piece:
"Globally an estimated 154 million lives have been saved by vaccines... this translates to 6 lives saved every minute of every year for the past 50 years."
www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/f...

The North Carolina Philosophical Society meeting this spring will be held here at Wake Forest University, with Zena Hitz as the keynote. Check out the call for papers!

northcarolinaphilosophicalsociety.org

Gigerenzer reflecting on Rationality Wars... article just published @bppjournal.bsky.social Logical rationality Vs Heuristics-and-Biases Vs Ecological Rationality approach. Basically, my whole PhD thesis (an epistemological history from H. Simon to Nudges) is here. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Reducing Sludge at Six Cass Sunstein and Lucia Reisch argue that the design of everyday things can be taken as a guidebook for policymakers; simplicity and intuitiveness of design lead to “sludge reduction”

How small changes can have big effects: Cass Sunstein & Lucia Reisch writing for our blog a few years ago

#BehSci #BehaviouralScience #Nudge

bppblog.com/2018/01/25/r...

Rationality entails more than cold-blooded logic—it is ecological, requires judgment and experience and is dependent on the particular problem and context we face in our world of uncertainty and intractability, argues Gerd Gigerenzer:
https://buff.ly/497guyk
HT @lionelpage@bsky.social

The globalizability of temporal discounting - Nature Human Behaviour Ruggeri et al. find in a study of 61 countries that temporal discounting patterns are globally generalizable. Worse financial environments, greater inequality and high inflation are associated with ex...

A few years ago, we ran a study of temporal discounting in 61 countries. Findings unmistakably indicated that temporal choice anomalies were a global concept, where environment - more so than culture - had significant impacts on country differences. A recent study has extended our work.

I just got my flu vaccine this week. Here is an article I published in 2022 in the Brazilian Journal of Public Policy about vaccine hesitancy: behavioral factors and solutions based on behavioral public policy (nudges, etc.). #vaccineswork
heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein...

PhD scholarships as part of the research project, “Behavioral Barriers to the Green Transition", CEBI, University of Copenhagen (UCPH)

Our good friend Christina Gravert is on the search for 2 fully-funded PhD scholars to join the team in Copenhagen. Deadline for applications 15th January. Full details 👇
jobportal.ku.dk/phd/?show=16...

Corruption deepens poverty & environmental degradation: diverting resources, undermining governance, and perpetuating inequality. In my latest article, I examine how Behavioral Public Policy helps us understand corruption, offering paths to reduce it. @bppjournal.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/bpp....

An updated take on the S-frame. ""An s-frame agenda for behavioral public policy research" | Behavioural Public Policy | Cambridge Core -
t.co/WChGxUUlt0

How Do Labor Shortages Affect Residential Construction and Housing Affordability?* Troup Howard„ Mengqi Wang… Dayin Zhang§ April 2023 Abstract U.S. housing markets have faced a secular shortage of housing supply in the past decade. Most explanations in the literature have tended to focus on the distortionary effect of local housing regulations. This paper provides novel evidence on a less-explored channel affecting housing supply: shortages of construction labor. We exploit the staggered rollout of a national increase in immigration enforcement to identify nega- tive shocks to construction sector employment that are likely exogenous with respect to local housing market conditions. We show that treated counties experience large and persistent reductions in residential construction activity, using measures of both planned and realized construction activity. This reduced housing supply is associated with increases in home prices. We also show that domestic labor supply does not fully offset immigration-related reductions in the construction sector; and that within higher-skilled construction occupations, U.S. workers see net declines as a consequence of increased immigration enforcement.

Figure 1: New Constructions and Construction Workers Figure shows a big reduction in construction workers around 2008-2009 is associated with a big decrease in new housing units. The reduction persists for a decade. NOTE: This figure plots the time treads of constructed new housing units and construction workers. The green bars are the annual new housing units per 1000 population (left axis) in the U.S. from Census Bureau and HUD. The two dash lines indicates the average levels of new housing units per 1000 population pre- GFC (1968–2007) and post-GFC (2009–2021). The orange line plots the number of construction workers per 1000 population (right axis) from ACS.

Trump argues mass deportation will reduce housing costs. In contrast, study finds increased immigration enforcement causes shortages of construction labor and “large reductions in residential construction… [which] is associated with increases in home prices.” www.haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/u...

IBPPC 2025 - Submissions | IBPPA

Abstracts deadline for the 4th annual International Behavioural Public Policy Conference is January 31st, 2025. Next year's conference will be in the UK, 10-12 September

Full details on abstract submission: www.ibppa.org/conference-s...

My research on explanatory reasons for corruption (based on bounded rationality and social models) and different strategies to reduce it using behavioral insights, in collaboration with my colleague from Ecuador Armenio Pérez, was just published. @bppjournal.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1017/bpp....